Drew Myron's Blog, page 61
June 2, 2013
On Sunday
Quite early on
I had discovered
the overlooked space
open to those of us
with a silent life.
— from The English Patient
a novel by Michael Ondaatje
May 29, 2013
"And I started writing"
The graduation season packs a wallop (what an odd word), which is to say announcements and invitations flood the mailbox and we get to gaze upon the precious faces of children we haven't seen since their parents' wedding some 18 to 22 years ago.
No, that's not true. I know most of these kids, and frankly, I'm surprised some of them have made it to the finish line. When I open announcements from students who were once flunking and floundering, my heart swells and I want to shower them with gifts. You did it! I also want to say, You think that was difficult? Wait 'til the bigger pond drowns you in sorrow. But I hold back. Let's keep 'em tender and trusting for just a bit longer.
In 2009, Ellen DeGeneres — comedian and icon — delivered what is now my favorite graduation speech. It's a hilarious message, with heart, and it bears repeating at this commencement season. And take note, her very successful comedy career began with writing:
I was soul-searching . . . I was like, I don't understand, there must be a purpose, and wouldn't it be so convenient if we could pick up the phone and call God, and ask these questions. And I started writing and what poured out of me was an imaginary conversation with God . . . and I finished writing it and I looked at it and I said to myself, and I hadn't even been doing stand-up, ever, there was no club in town. I said, "I'm gonna do this on the Tonight Show With Johnny Carson" — at the time he was the king — "and I'm gonna be the first woman in the history of the show to be called over to sit down." And several years later, I was the first woman in the history of the show, and only woman in the history of the show to sit down, because of that phone conversation with God that I wrote.
— Ellen DeGeneres
commencement speech at Tulane University, 2009
May 27, 2013
A Mixed Memorial
Weeping Angel - Cincinnati - Spring Grove Cemetery - David Ohmer / Foter.com / CC BY
If ever a prize for the holiday with the most mixed messages, Memorial Day would take an easy win.
From barbecue picnics to Macy sales, to cemetery visits and festive parades, Memorial Day is a mixed bag of reverence, sorrow and start-of-summer-celebration. We offer thanks for selfless military service but gratitude comes with a heavy heart that recognizes every side loses something, someone. Freedom, yes, but always at a price.
Poet Emma Shaw Crane addresses this sort of mixed emotion:
prayer for a soldier back from baghdad
you, my kindergarten best friend come
home
talking of nailing breathing targets
drunk/angry you tell me to SHUT UP
a lesson I inherited from my grandfather
we a family of marines: the few/the proud
I was three the first time he kicked me
I slammed eyes closed to the rug
rage is a battle scar
semper fi
this is distant war brought home
from Baghdad Okinawa Mosul Tarawa
we the emotional casualties
our childhood of long august afternoons
n apple branch forts:
collateral damage
what can i ask:
did you shatter Iraqi cheekbones?
did you hang
someone's father from
dislocated shoulders
in the screaming doorways
of Abu Ghraib?
at your goodbye barbeque before boot
camp you jumped me into the pool
for a moment in your arms:
before the impact/before the hit
my cheek to your collarbone
my eyes closed against your neck
I repeat this flash second of tenderness like
a rosary
my prayer for you/for the rainbow
you drew me on my seventh birthday
for the people you kill I will never meet
someone else's beloveds:
children blown apart playing marbles
like we used to
under a kitchen table
this is my prayer for my grandfather
his angry hands trembling/our relationship
sacrificed
for sweaty midnight nightmares of
Nagasaki after the bomb
a handful of medals/veterans' bake sales
children that fear him/ a black n white
photograph of boy men (the smiling sons
of anxious mothers)
ripped apart
in a war my grandfather will never return
from
war takes our men away from us
an invisible paperless draft
out of juvenile halls
trailer parks
principals' offices n
single parent poverty
our grandfathers/our cousins/our first
loves/
n our hometown high school kids
come home talking of
nailing breathing targets
bring nightmares to our kitchens our
orchards
our bedrooms n our streets
I'm praying in poems for you/my
kindergarten best friend
I just want you back alive/I just want you
back with your soul
I pray for the people you kill
mothers walking to buy milk
lean gentle young men like you once were
lovers tangled up in each other
children chasing chickens like we use to
n I pray for myself because
what does it mean to love the murderer?
— Emma Shaw Crane
from Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25
edited and introduced by Naomi Shihab Nye
May 23, 2013
Thankful Thursday: Silence
photo by dobrych/Creative Commons
Turn up the quiet
A dense forest,
a long road,
the hush of a pew.
Between each swell
even the ocean churns
out a rush of silence.
At home the refrigerator
hums in a steel envelope
of calm. When an ice cube drops
an after-silence descends that we
would not hear but for the fall.
This blanket, on this couch,
wraps a quiet that does not
bend as much as billows
and pillows and tucks
into my every sharp
angle.
I am a quiet
person in a quiet
life and still I crave
silence the way a
drunk craves the cocktail
that will change every promise and past.
In silence, thoughts gather,
divide, settle in quiet corners
to wait patient as Sunday
for a maybe
for a yes.
- Drew Myron
It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things and more. What are you thankful for today?
May 21, 2013
Are you a sponge?
Take What You Need ProjectI'm a sponge.
This week I am saturated, sour, and a bit wrung out.
For those with sponge personalities, words both wound and revive.
( How do you know if you're a sponge? If you are unable to apply this phrase to your life: "Let it roll off you like water off a duck's back" — you are likely a sponge, unconsciously absorbing the emotional tremor of every room you enter. )
But it's not all bad. In this state, the best solution after saturation is to retreat, absorbing what fills you, not depletes you.
We can't stop the world and simply get off. There are, after all, jobs to do, deadlines to meet, dinners to make . . . but we can choose to take a mental break (as in pause, not to be confused with break down) from resistance.
And so, this week I was absorbed by a radio interview with poet Marie Howe. How refreshing it felt to listen to intelligent, creative people exchange ideas without showmanship or banter, just genuine and mutual respect. And it strikes me now how sad that this type of conversation feels refreshing, rather than normal. The interview is here: On Being with Krista Tippett and Marie Howe. Click on radio show/podcast in upper left.
Also this week, I retreated in books, absorbed by:
The Dinner — a riveting novel by Henry Koch.
Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Trandscendence in Competitive Yoga — an engaging memoir-experience by Benjamin Lorr.
Just This, striking tanka poems by Margaret Chula.
It is reminder, these ideas thoughtfully written or gently spoken, that words will almost always restore my faith and spirit, my energy for life.
What restores you?
May 16, 2013
Thankful Thursday: You are what you do
Remember:
you are not who you think you are. You are what you do. Be the kindness of soft rain. Be the beauty of light behind a tall fir. Be gratitude. Be gladness.
— Kathleen Dean Moore
Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature
May 13, 2013
Insider Info (Get a Cat)
I found a treasure trove!
With poetry.us.com, Mark Thalman — teacher, poet, and one-man poetry promoter — shines a light on his favorite writers with a website featuring their books, poems and advice.
Sometimes a writer just needs a little nudge. Sometimes a well-timed keep on really does make a difference.
Here, a few of my favorite tips:
It’s been said over and over, but truly it’s the best advice I can give: Read poetry widely and deeply for joy, for love of it, for what it can teach you about how to write, and for what it can teach you about being human in this beautiful and difficult world.
Keep writing. (Threshold took me more than ten years to write.)
Keep submitting. (Before it finally won, Threshold was a finalist in twenty-five national book contests).
Never give up.
As for advice for others, it is really simple: Read! Read! Read!
People talk about being writers, dream like writers, travel like writers, party like writers, but don't write much. We need experiences, sure. But the writers are home writing.
Advice I often give to my students: Don’t tell a poem what to do; listen to what it wants. If you don’t understand this, get a cat.
Your turn! Do you have a favorite piece of advice, or a tip to share with other writers?
May 10, 2013
Thankful Thursday: Stop being such a jerk
I praised the sun that warmed the earth.
The next day I praised the lavender blooming from the heat.
The next day I cursed the aphids.
It's like that this week. My gratitude has got some bumps, and I'm clutching three small words: help, thanks, wow.
Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.
— Anne Lamott
from Help, Thanks, Wow
It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express gratitude for people, places, things & more. Joy contracts and expands in proportion to our gratitude. What makes your world expand?
May 7, 2013
Did you ever reach out?
I'm thinking of Judy Blume.
As a child I was certain she had peered into my life and written books just for me: Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, and Blubber and Deenie. I wrote her a letter of earnest appreciation — and she wrote back! I don't remember her words but I do recall that it was the first time I saw a writer as a real, warm and human person.
Over the years I've read again and again Letters to a Young Poet, a compilation of letters Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to an aspiring writer. I like the idea of mentor-by-correspondence.
"In a letter," writes Anne Carson," both reader and writer discover an ideal image of themselves, short blinding passages are all it takes."
A few years ago, I wrote a letter to a poet whose work I admired, and though we shared a mutual friend, never was a word returned.
Today I read of a long and rich correspondence between two writers a generation apart. I feel awe, and a bit of envy, too.
How about you? Do you write to writers? Or did a reader write to you? Do you have a tale to tell?
May 4, 2013
10 books that shaped my writing life
A nearby library recently received a grant to buy poetry. What books, they asked me, would you suggest?
After brief dismay (money to buy poetry?! this is a rare and wonderful occasion), my mind raced and whirled. How to choose? Award-winning books? Classic poetry? Contemporary? Regional? Mainstream favorites? My latest favorites?
After all the mental hubalub, I offered the following list of books I learned from and loved, the poetry collections that, though I didn't recognize at the time, shaped my writing life:
The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich
With a close command of language and line, Rich masterfully unspools experience.
A conversation begins
with a lie. And each
speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart
Live or Die by Anne Sexton
Sexton was master of confession (long before social media saturation).
But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland
This book delivered revelation: a poem can be funny, witty, sarcastic, sad, and tell a story, and all at once!
The sparrows are a kind of people
Who lost a war a thousand years ago;
As punishment all their color was taken away.
The Way It Is by William Stafford
A model of productivity, Stafford wrote over 50 books — and his first was not published until age 46!
What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson
Is this book a very long poem, or a semi-short story? Carson calls it “a fictional essay.” I call it brilliant.
XXIV. And kneeling at the edge of the transparent sea I shall shape for myself a new heart from salt and mud.
A wife is in the grip of being.
Easy to say Why not give up on this?
But let’s suppose your husband and a certain dark woman
like to meet at a bar in early afternoon.
Love is not conditional.
Living is conditional.
50 poems by e.e. cummings
Cummings showed me what a language could do, what a poem could be.
love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more freqent than to fail
The Book of Questions by Pablo Neruda
Yes, poems can be silly, surreal and stirring.
And what is the name of the month
that falls between December and January?
Why didn’t they give us longer
months that last all year?
And three more — not poetry, but poetic:
Dear Diego by Elena Poniatowska
A poignant, delicate story of art and unrequited love, told through letters.
Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton
As a younger writer, this book provided comfort and relief.
And it occurs to me that there is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much. It may be that I set my sights too high and so repeatedly end the day in depression. Not easy to find the balance, for if one does not have wild dreams of achievement there is no spur even to get the dishes washed. One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Tight, lyrical prose turns this intimate story about sexual awakening into a poetic, searing story of love.
Note: Don't worry, this process didn't dismiss local and lesser known poets. I also composed a list of regional favorites, and another poet gathered a list of Oregon's award-winning poets.
Now it's your turn. What's on your list? What books have stayed with you, have shaped your writing life?
